A New Byatt Novel With a Novel Within

By MEL GUSSOW

Published: July 9, 1996

Deep into A. S. Byatt's new book, "Babel Tower," the third in a projected quartet of novels about the interplay of life, language and literature in postwar England, the protagonist offers pithy summaries of the landscapes of contemporary writers: "Murdochian moral intricacy, Sparkian wit and bizarrerie." Asked in a recent interview if she could similarly characterize her own work, Ms. Byatt said, "The two words I would most like to have applied are empiricism and elegance." To those, her readers might add intellect and imagination.

The choice would depend on which Byatt book is under scrutiny. While the novels in the quartet follow Frederica Potter on her path from Yorkshire to Cambridge to literary London, Ms. Byatt's best sellers, "Possession" and "Angels and Insects," could borrow "moral intricacy" and "wit and bizarrerie" from Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark. Through these and other works, she has become a prismatic creative talent.

For many years, however, she was overshadowed by her younger sister, Margaret Drabble, the prolific author of "The Needle's Eye" and other books. With "Possession," Ms. Byatt took a giant step into the artistic spotlight.

"Babel Tower" carries the characters of "The Virgin in the Garden" and "Still Life" into the 1960's, but it paints a larger, more vibrant canvas. As does "Possession," the new book includes a narrative within a narrative, in this case a dystopian novel written by one of the book's characters.

The book focuses on Frederica, who is, in Ms. Byatt's description, "a slightly transgressive, independent woman -- a whistling woman," as in a favorite refrain of the novelist's grandmother: "A whistling woman and a crowing hen is neither good for God nor men."

Although Frederica draws characteristics from Ms. Byatt, among others, she is by no means a self-portrait. The author's role in the book, as in all her books, is as narrator. In common wih her model, George Eliot, she studiously keeps herself at a distance: "If I deployed my own follies, I would be embarrassed." What she doesn't want to write, she says, are novels that are "self-exculpatorial or self-regarding."

She said that the character in the quartet who is closest to her is Frederica's older sister, Stephanie. In "Still Life," Stephanie tries to rescue a wandering bird from under a refrigerator and is crushed to death. Years ago, Ms. Byatt was almost electrocuted in similar circumstances. She was saved by her quick-thinking husband.

In her grand novelistic scheme, "Still Life" was meant to deal with accidental death, but by the time she came to write it, she was confronted by her own family tragedy. The week of his 11th birthday, her son was killed in an automobile accident. After that, "it was almost impossible to write about Stephanie," she said. Understandably, it is still difficult for her to talk about this traumatic event.

Somehow she managed to finish "Still Life," and then several years later turned to "Possession" for romantic relief. Although she thought the book might be popular, she was unprepared for its runaway success. After "Angels and Insects" and the ironic "Matisse Stories," she returned to Frederica and her family.

One of the principal figures in the new book is Frederica's irascible father. Asked if he was based on her own father, she said it was not her father but her mother. "All the screaming and shouting was my mother," she said, "and the only way I could publish the book was to change the gender and hope my mother wouldn't notice. Of course, she did."

"My sister Maggie and my mother used to have huge shouting matches," she said, adding that her father was silent, but "when he was there, on the whole the roaring stopped." From her point of view, "men are bringers of sanity, clarity, order, peace."

But what about Jude Mason, the mad, outrageous author of the novel within "Babel Tower"? He is, of course, an exception, a combination, she said, of Gollum in "The Hobbit," Quentin Crisp and Ms. Byatt's inkwell.

Did she say inkwell? Sitting on her desk at home in London is a 19th-century inkwell "in the shape of a squatting figure covered with scales, with a pointed nose and a long, spiny tail." The inkwell is her "writing talisman."

At the beginning of her career, when she was married to Ian Byatt, an economist, Antonia Byatt adopted the name A. S. Byatt, in homage to T. S. Eliot, who, she said, felt that writers should be anonymous. As a result, her grandchildren and others often call her A. S. Since 1969, she has been married to Peter Duffy, an investment analyst.

Her former husband is well known in his own right in England. When he was interviewed about his days at the London School of Economics, he was asked if Mick Jagger had been a fellow student, "or Peter Duffy, who married A. S. Byatt." Mr. Byatt replied, "Well, I married her myself, once."

The choice of A. S. as signature was also intentionally androgynous. Ms. Byatt said, "I don't write out of an enclave of women who see men as incurably other." Her heroines include George Eliot, Willa Cather, Ms. Murdoch and Toni Morrison. An active critic, she can be sardonic about "peacocky male novelists." When Martin Amis demanded, and got, a huge advance for "The Information" in 1994, she called his approach "a kind of male turkey cocking."

Real people often make appearances in her books. In one, E. M. Forster is seen falling asleep at a tea party, an incident that Ms. Byatt observed in life. Anthony Burgess is in "Babel Tower," offering expert testimony at a censorship trial. "The Virgin in the Garden" begins at the National Portrait Gallery, where Antonia Fraser is seen "accompanied by a dumpy woman in a raincoat."

Who is that dumpy woman? "It's me," said Ms. Byatt, reserving her self-regard for her art. "I'm not glamorous," she said, "but I did quite well at being sexy when I was the right age, partly owing to the accident of there being 11 men to one woman at Cambridge. They used to ask me to marry them once a week."

For relaxation, Ms. Byatt often watches nature programs on television, but not ones about wildlife. "Snails and slugs are more miraculous," she said. "Until you see them under a microscope you don't know what they can do." She said that were she not a novelist, she would have been a naturalist. Her fascination extends to insects, a fact that led her to write "Angels and Insects" and to be involved in the recent movie version.

In addition to the fourth Frederica book, Ms. Byatt has two other novels "on the boil," one about two women who are psychoanalysts in the time of Freud, the other dealing with people in England in the 1890's. She plans to call it "The Hedgehog, the White Goose and the Mad March Hare," because "it's about the awful effect a children's story writer has on her children." In that novel there will also be "a fizzing of socialism and eugenics with George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells around the edges."

During a long, demanding book tour through the United States, Ms. Byatt was anxious to get back to work. That morning she went for a swim in her hotel pool, as she often does. She said that while she was swimming, "three tiny sentences" of her next novel came into her head. "I thought, it's all right," she said. "You're still there."

Photo: A. S. Byatt, in a New York hotel during a United States booktour. (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)